


You're something beautiful (A contradiction)

by winterysomnium



Series: Poolboy AU [1]
Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: M/M, poolboy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-12-04 09:39:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterysomnium/pseuds/winterysomnium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten minutes; Tim can do plenty within them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're something beautiful (A contradiction)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [varebanos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/varebanos/gifts).



> Dedicated to varebanos. Happy birthday!♥

If it was good for the structure of his life, if it was healthy for the construction of bones and skin and clothes he’s made of, if it could’ve done something for the ghost town his family has become, Tim would live within time, within the present, within the moment more.

Wouldn’t chop thin hours of talk and tapes into witty minutes weekly, wouldn’t eat too fast not knowing what makes his stomach clench inside of him more, the speed for which he gets scolded if his Mom’s jaw isn’t set too tight, scolded if she isn’t too lost between the expensive tips of her cutlery and cold fingers, as distant as she’s still or if it’s the way there’s nowhere to breathe in this dining room, oxygen sucked out right before he can breathe in, stolen from his lungs the moment they expand, the second his Dad sits across from them dosed in perfume tainted with someone else’s skin, with hours of exposure, late and loud.

(They’re there for _him_ , _he_ is and they try to be his childhood parents in love so he’s trying to be the kid he was before England and boarding schools and getting attached to honesty, before he has given his first hand job in the boys’ bathroom and decided that come is a bit nasty, a bit too thick and bitter but – it might’ve been the spit and sweat on his palm too, might’ve been the drag of his thoughts that made his mouth feel so heavy, might’ve been the kid in him scrunching up his nose and the three of them: they know that the divorce is the proper rupture. They know that it’s the right amount of collapse they all need, need to shake them up, to unstitch, to unzip them all over again.) 

He doesn’t want to lose time within this airless space, this catatonic body of a relationship, the mother a drifting mind and her son the descending spine and the father the still heart, the shallow lungs and his young, public secret as the cage he bumps into, pushes into and pulls from and Tim, Tim needs to pull himself from that room too, at least for this summer, at least for these months, at least for these meals.

(He needs to be there for them when they’re alone.)

\---

Ten minutes; Tim can do plenty within them. He can devour his dinner without having to talk, can clean the whole of the wooden, luxury tables the Waynes clutter around the side of their pool, can deliver a punch line to get smiles out of his screen, silvery crowd or deliver a punch strong enough to crack noses and even if he hasn’t quite managed to not drink all of the icy lemonade and resist the small talk of Alfred’s voice it’s not – it’s not that important. He’s happier when he doesn’t anyway, when the accent and the scent of milky tea covers the drafts inside his skin, outside of his veins, when time slips through the solid of his palms and he isn’t anywhere near to be full of home yet, never is so he can tap his knuckles against the glass door and get his daily unprescribed dose the next afternoon, darker where he’s wet, warm where he’s dry.

(That’s what _time_ is for, how vacation should differentiate from _vacancy_ , a concept he’s not sure he grasped before, something that wasn’t there beyond the papery definitions, beyond a shallow _I know_.) 

_I know that they love me._

\---

Ten minutes at school nags at his bones like a month; he’s tired from the core of them, as if the building was deconstructing around him, all of it falling through into his chest, dirty sand and rough bricks and the matted yell of glass; he creaks in tones of rusty machines, in songs of old floors. 

(He has to remind himself that this is not supposed to be all fun yet, that he’s new and stranger in it, that he’s not known.)

Fun itself is reduced to this one guy he eats lunch with who can’t stick a label to him and eats all of his leftover fries, fun is compressed to faintly amused laughs and salty oil on fingers and leaving, it’s opening the carefully built in control panel pressed between the roots of Damian’s shoulder blades and recognizing which buttons he should push, which will burn his fingertips, which won’t budge; which will make Damian push back. 

Fun are fifteen minute breaks that are five minutes of Tim not letting ice cubes dissolve inside of his soda glass, it’s minutes of placing them onto his tongue, chewing on their disappearing edges with his teeth, wincing if the cold hits a sore, achy spot and – the real, immediate fun are the ten minutes counted with alarm clocks of phones and of Damian warming his teeth and mouth up, minutes of him scraping Tim’s back that’s half sun-dried softness and half wet, soggy cotton against the naked wall whose other side once was Tim’s too, was a corner of his home and as far as he researched it’s still empty, vacant, a ghost of a house similar to the house he lives in _now_ , strained and held to the ground by their feet and somehow, part of him feels as hollow as his old home and part of him is so full the pressure topples him forward, right into Damian’s stupidly well done, confident face, handsome even when he’s an inch from Tim’s chin and Tim can see the tiny, minute imperfections, can tell if Damian has shaved in the morning or before dinner, discovers the weight of his wrists.

He doesn’t tell anyone.

(They’re as heavy as his touch.)

He stops Damian’s kiss after he licks at his mouth and the warm, coloured plastic of his heat slippery phone is dropped into his hand with a huff, a shift of knees that’s a subtle hurry up, his hips giving a jerk, jostled by the thigh Damian sinks between his own; Tim is grounded to the shore of the grass, the border of the property and for now: he lets him. Lets him touch his sides, dig his nails into the seam of his shirt while Tim sets the alarm, slips the phone back into his pocket and tugs at the back of Damian’s neck, reaches for his mouth without any success once, twice, Damian’s smirk escaping Tim until he’s at the tips of his toes, at the tips of his patience and he rolls his eyes, puts his weight back on his heels, on the whole of his soles. “Chop, chop, stud,” he says and it’s as if he could feel the time tick under his pocket, feel it resound in his belly when Damian doesn’t move, curls his mouth into a sneer.

“Did _farm boy_ teach you that chop chop nonsense?” He asks, condescending with the sort of a quick, sizzling pang that stings from the underside of people’s skin, that you can’t rub out of your muscles and Tim has realized this weeks, early days before. Damian doesn’t necessarily dislike _Conner_. He just feel threatened by the concept of him. 

(By the concept of someone being so close to someone else.)

\---

“Jason did, actually,” Tim answers and hooks two fingers under the taut nylon of Damian’s trunks, _tugging_ , the horizon of Damian’s shy winter skin skimming past his vision as Damian grips his fingers until they slip out, the fabric hitting his hips with a snap that would be improper, _obscene_ without their mouths open and pressed together like they both might disintegrate, like their bones might crumble if they don’t want it enough and Tim knows it’s not good, not _healthy_ for him to get too intimate, too open or close so he doesn’t, doesn’t place his hands _anywhere_ but puts them back into his pockets up to his wrists and he’s – he’s cool with this.

He’s cool with them being the fling they are, he’s cool with not giving up his phone number and he’s cool with the limits they have, the minutes they get between the hours of Damian being an annoying, immature prick without Tim’s composure dropping down his chest, without Damian losing his own.

(And Tim might tell him once summer is gone and the lingering heat will be just that, will be but a shade under a parasol dipped in sand, will be just the foam at the ends of the salt and repeat waves of the ocean, a memory soaked into his skin at night. He might tell him that the afternoon hours spent here?

Were never a waste.)


End file.
